Drink Your Water
It's interesting to me just how, well, spoiled for lack of a better word, we are when it comes to beverages. Water is vital for life, it's basically free in the developed world, and, once you get used to it, you will find it is delicious. Water and the human body are designed for each other, a marriage made in Heaven, if you will.=)
Yet we are nearly desperate to avoid it, even as people in third world countries are dying from lack of access to this same miraculous substance. In doing some google searches on how to save money on beverages, I found a number of complicated suggestions which can be summed up:
Buy generic
Buy powdered mixes instead of bottled drinks and dilute it further.
Buy in bulk
Shop in discount supermarkets
Oh, and make your kids split cans of coke instead of having one all to themselves, assuming
Sometimes we look for big, dramatic ways to save money when a small simple thing has been right at our elbow all along, waiting to be noticed. The simplest way to save money on beverages is to drink water.
My family mostly drinks water. They do also get milk, and occasionally tea, if they make it. I am not a big iced tea fan, in spite of my southern roots. My daddy put sweet tea in my baby bottle and I rejected it from an infant, causing him to swear I was a changling child and no true daughter of the South. The only beverages my mother served with meals were sweet tea or water, so I grew up as the lone water drinker in my household. It might have been lonely, but since sweet tea tastes to me much as I imagine dirty dishwater might, I did not feel like I was missing out.
And since I do not like tea, and both my husband and I like water, that is what my Progeny have mostly grown up drinking- water. As they grew older they added tea to the beverages served, but the tea they drink today is either sassafrass tea made from roots my son digs up in our woods, or herbal tea we buy in bulk from the co-op, but it is not what we drink with most meals. It's a treat. Because I don't like tea, by the way, it would not be a treat if I made it, because I cannot tell the difference between good tea and dreck (and I secretly doubt there is a difference). So at every meal, we serve water, and sometimes milk.
If you never start with juices, sweetened drink mixes, and cokes (or pop, soda, or whatever your regional accent calls it), your kids will drink water, and you don't have to figure out where to store bulk drinks, shop at a discount, spend years making powdered drinks at half dilution, and convince two children that they want exactly the same kind of soda at precisely the same moment.
But what if it's too late- your kids- or their parents- are used to beverages being full of syruppy goodness (or badness) and artificial flavors so water tastes funny to them? You can just go cold turkey, and there are merits to that approach. There are also merits to a slower process, and each family will have to choose which way to take for themselves.
Now, one of our adopted children came to us able to operate the vending machine and get herself a coke at the age of three- a skill she had learned at two. They did not drink water, they drank cokes, and sometimes chocolate milk. And, to be honest, one of them still is not that fond of water- she does not drink enough of it. But there were some things we did to help her get over an aversion to any beverage that wasn't sweetened to the point of being syrupy.
We eliminated carbonated beverages cold turkey, because in our case, we had not been buying them in the first place. The only way NOT to eliminate them cold turkey was to start buying something that, up to that point, we never purchased. Furthermore, carbonated soda just cannot really be diluted. It's gross.
We offered juice and sweetened herbal teas instead. Gradually, we increased the water and decreased the sweeteners so that she became acclimated to a more natural taste, and more sensitive to sweetener. Our goal was to get down to all water and no foreign beverages. When we introduced straight water, we added slices of lemon or lime, mint leaves (we grow these ourselves), and sometimes a drop or two of stevia. Gradually, we reduced these props as well, and quit buying juice. For a time, we had a check off chart to encourage everybody in the family to drink enough water, because water is not just a frugality issue, it's a health issue. Few of us drink as much of it as we should.
We each have our own water bottle or glass, as well, to be refilled several times a day. Drink your water. It's good for your budget, and it's good for you.
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If you haven't been reading the Four Moms, 35 Kids posts, I hope you will. Yesterday we four moms wrote about grocery shopping and budgeting.
My post, The Growing Family Beats the Incredible Shrinking Dollar Like a Redheaded Stepchild, is here. (No offense to redheads or stepfamilies. Okay, the redheaded stepchild thing I just put in there because it's late and I am feeling punchy.
Here's Kimberly's post at Raising Olives. Like her, we also make our own laundry soap and use cloth napkins. Here's a Q and A post I did about the laundry soap.
Here's Kim's., our hostess here and over at Life in a Shoe I love her idea about buying produce in bulk. We don't have a produce warehouse nearby that I know of. However, did you know you can ask your produce manager at your local grocery store if you can buy produce in bulk, and the answer just might be yes? We can get a case of apples (which our family finishes in a week), for ten percent off.
Here's Connie's, who blogs at Smockity Frocks. A freezer is, indeed, a huge help. We usually have deer meat and locally grown pork and beef in ours- a farmer friend gives us a pig around Christmas time, and my husband's boss usually gives us a deer for letting him hunt on our property.
related posts:
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- 10 ways to cut your grocery bill Inspired by The Simple Dollar's article on Trimming the Average...
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8 Responses to “Drink Your Water”
April 2nd, 2010 at 6:38 am
A suggestion:
One way to make water more tempting to those not accustomed to drinking it is to store some in a pitcher in the fridge and to float cucumber slices, mint, and/or lemon slices in the water. It gives the water an added boost of refreshment. Additionally, storing water for a period of time before serving it helps to reduce the chlorine taste in tap water, if that’s a problem in your area.
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:33 am
My girls only drink water. We’ve offered diluted fruit juice to them on many occasions and the little declares, “icky wa wa!”
Water is our mealtime beverage.
We occasionally make herbal tea or hot chocolate. Once in a great while I’ll buy soda as a special treat for my older son since his grandparents started him down that road years ago.
We have a Big Berkey water filter and it makes a very tasty filtered water! From their literature “Each set of two (2) elements will remove harmful pathogenic bacteria such as E-coli, Cholera Salmonella Typhi, Giardia and Cryptosporidium. The filters remove and reduce unwanted chemicals such as chlorine, lead, rust, sediment, pesticides, herbicides, organic solvents, VOC’s, SOC’s, trihalomethanes and foul tastes and odors. The durable and efficient Black Berkey elements can be cleaned and re-cleaned (up to 100 times or more) as needed with a soft brush or Scotch-Brite pad.”
We’ve had our two filters for well over three years now and they’re still filtering our water.
April 2nd, 2010 at 12:36 pm
I recently posted about our battle in the juice wars. There are many other benefits, too. Our kids will actually eat their food. Its better on their teeth. No surprises found in the lost sippy cup. And we were able to have fruit as a dessert, becasue they had been weaned off of so much sugar.
April 2nd, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Funny you should bring this up. My husband & I just recently had a conversation regarding increasing our family’s water intake and lessening its dependence on all other beverages.
Our three older children rarely drink anything other than water as that’s pretty much all they were ever served when younger. They will take water over soda or juice any day.
Our three younger children are a different story. Our family currently qualifies for WIC and part of the WIC package is a monthly allotment of juice. Our younger ones are becoming anti-water as a result of it the juice we receive. There are no alternatives you can request in place of the juice so we have decided to start donating it when we receive it.
It amazes me how many parents believe juice is a great alternative to soda when in reality the sugar contents are pretty similar.
April 2nd, 2010 at 4:00 pm
I used to drink soda and quit cold turkey. (This was hard because no one else in my family was quitting so my mom and stepdad keep bringing home the twelve packs!) Now that I’ve been off it for six months, I find it tastes absolutely disgusting to me when I find myself in dire circumstances where I must drink it. (Yes, it happens. My parents favorite restaurant offers soda, tea, or water. The water is city water that hasn’t been purified, which tastes really gross, literally like there is dirt in it, and I feel the same way about tea as you do.)
Even before I quit drinking cokes, my favorite drink was always milk. I am always getting in trouble for drinking too much too fast.
Milk is fairly expensive but so, so worth it, in my opinion. My grandma hates milk and the most dairy she ever gets is cheese and ice cream. My mom and her sisters drink some milk but not a whole lot. The three of them are all taking fairly large doses of whatever that osteoporosis prevention medication is, and my grandmother has it bad, and has fallen and ended up in the hospital. Perhaps this has colored my view and perhaps milk is not the help to strong bones they say it is, but in my mind its non-negotiable. (And very tasty!)
I used to not drink much water, but since cutting the sodas and being thirsty, I started, and now all I ever have is water, milk, and the occasional lemonade and juices. I find most of the juices to be too sweet these days and am trying to cut them out as well.
And all my southern family and friends think I’m strange for not drinking sweet tea as well! I think I tolerate it better than you do, but it tastes like dirty water to me.
April 4th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
I grew up as whatever’s in the fridge is what’s there to eat and drink, i used to get into trouble for drinking too much milk but i can’t recall seeing a jug of water, so soda and juices were my thing. Just about a couple months ago, i decided to not go cold turkey but dramatically reduce my intake of 2 cans per day to about 1 can in one week for soda and i bought some orange juice that is reduced in sugar and still taste sweet (but before when i drank it, it was really dull tasting). I can honestly say that I haven’t craved it as bad as the last time i tried to cut back, and when eating instead of a soda would really taste good, it’s a glass of water would really taste good. and i like it because it washes the palette and i can enjoy my food more. i don’t buy soda for me any more its great on the wallet and beneficial to my health. i hate drinking water from the sink, even when i had a purifier it still tasted gross, i just buy the water from the culligan machine, it really tastes good. but i’m mostly happy that now i feel that i’m not addicted to sugar drinks anymore, and it’s a very powerful feeling to know that.
April 4th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Mmama Llama, there is an oatmeal casserole recipe on my regular blog that you can make using a can of apple juice for the sweetener and liquid, and it’s really yummy that way.
April 5th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
We try and use cloth napkins abd recycle because we drink lots of bottled water.
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